| the model, the stylist, the belly dancer, and the producer |
[Aug. 25th, 2004|02:15 am] |
I had intended on staying at home, I watched Entourage and Nip/Tuck, both good television, if you know what I mean. At 11, I realized my friend of a friend was going to debut his (his) belly dance at Hookah, a Tuesday night event to attract patrons to Akbar. So I went. I was immediately cruised by the producer with the brand new super-hot Porsche, (I'd tell you the model#, but I don't do labels). And he bought me a drink, gave me his digits, tried to get me to come home with him. Told me his life story which isn't so different from mine except he was a little mean to those less fortunate. I put him in his place, which he took gracefully, so there's a glimmer of hope he might be a decent person.
My arch-nemesis, also named Andrew, cute, pierced, and bleached (as always) was there, but suddenly he likes me. I love it when that happens.
Then the belly dancer did his thing which was so brave and beautiful, if I hadn't known him already, we'd have bonded after that show.
And then the model spent the rest of his time with me.
I'm home alone now, but who cares, so are they. Sex is not crucial. I could have gone home with all of them, well, that is except for the belly dancer. Unless I tried, but that would have been too much drama. I know how to find them.
Of course the real point here is what am I doing to receive this attention. There is only one answer. A question actually: "What the fuck?" Sometimes you just have to say, "What the fuck?" I know it's Tom Cruise and all, and that he's probably living a riskless life (is that possible for an actor?) but it's still true. Don't ever forget it or you'll waste your life away second-guessing your own existance.
A fun night to cap an amazing weekend. |
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| A CRASH |
[Aug. 19th, 2004|02:50 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Love Will Come Through-Travis | ] |
I was in the shower last night when my neighbor called. She left a message which I checked moments later. The gay boy, the son of her best old friends in Massachusetts was on mushrooms and was having a hard time. She asked me to come and see if I could help him get through it for a little while.
Earlier in the week she told me he'd be coming to visit and asked if I could show him around. "I'd be happy to." But he found his own way around and I still hadn't met him when she called. I've taken mushrooms before, and never really liked them. All of my other friends would be laughing endlessly and telling stories and laughing some more and I'd be all clenched and silent, and my mouth would be tight and turned down. I kept trying mushrooms, hoping for that one time that I'd be all laughing too, but that time never came for me.
I wasn't sure if there was anything I could do or say that would help this kid, and I had to go to a birthday party, but Sissy is a friend of mine, and it would be selfish to ignore her plea for help, so I stopped by her door on my way out, gift in hand. She called the boy, Tim, to the door to talk to me. He didn't come right away. She told me he'd tried to run away, and retreated into the house to find him. She came back with him in tow. He's 26, and really sturdy looking with curly brown hair framing his studly face and brown eyes. I thought I could like this boy. Why is he having a freakout? Sissy told me he wanted to go back to the place where he ate the mushrooms, that maybe he could start over or reset himself. I told him not to. He's in a safe place, that nothing bad would happen to him if he stayed in the house with Sissy. Okay, he said. I told him that just because he's not all laughing and having a great time, it doesn't mean he's having a bad time. I told him he should just get comfortable, listen to some music, and wait for it to go away. He said he'd be okay. He seemed like he'd be okay.
I went back up to my house to get the gift certificate from Rockaway Records which I'd gotten for my friend's 40th birthday. He doesn't even like music but it was the only place still open, and none of my friends mind getting gift certificates any more. A minute later Sissy was calling me back down. This time she was even more frantic. "He's disappeared, and he took a knife!" I ran back down to her place hoping not to create a panic. "Are you sure?" She showed me the open utensil drawer in the kitchen and pointed out that one of the chef's knives was now missing from the knife block. "Fuck." "Where is he?" "Tim!" Tim?" "Tim!" I didn't want to call too, didn't want to freak him out by having people he didn't even know calling his name out. I had visions of finding him in the dark against a garden wall cutting himself. It wasn't pretty. Sissy kept calling him and then I heard a shriek and the tearing of shrubs and a crash noise. It was hard to tell what the sound was. It had come from next door, the property below mine. It could be him, it could just be a neighbor throwing something, but what was that shriek noise? I knew where to look, but I was hoping it wasn't what I thought. I went to the property line, checking the narrow alley next to the house first, in fear that a knife-wielding Tim might lunge from the shadows. There was no Tim in the shadows, but in the flower bed twelve feet below me, there was a crumpled boy lying on his back, writhing.
"Sissy, I found him, it's okay."
I went down the ramp to the street in front of the property and rushed up the stairs to the neighbor's garden. Dan, the grip who lives in the front house came outside. "I need your help," I told him. He followed me next door. Tim was on the ground lying on his back in a flower bed, trying to get up. The scene was eerily beautiful with the crushed flowers all around him and the yellowish-orange haze spilling down the the cobra streetlamp above. "Don't move!" Dan stood by his head and held him down by the shoulders. "I have to get up!" I have to get out of here!" I'm in hell!" "Julie!" "Julie!" I wondered who Julie was. An ex-girlfriend he broke up with when he realized he was gay? No, I found out later that Julie was a friend of his, She's died, and he blamed himself. I don't know any of the details. He continued writhing, Dan continued to hold him down. I called 911 and was on hold for three or four minutes. Fuck. "Don't move!"
"I'm numb, I can't feel my legs. I'm in hell, I have to get out of here. My back hurts!" I looked for the knife and couldn't see it anywhere. An image flashed in my mind of the knife beneath him, lodged into his back, his body bleeding out undetected into the rich garden soil beneath. Dan knelt above his head, gravely silent, trying to calm him down while pinning his shoulders to the earth. He's really good for that. Finally the 911 operator connected me with the EMT operator and he told me they are already on the way. "Thank you."
A fire truck showed up, I told him we need an ambulance. "We're EMT's, an ambulance is on the way." I explained about the mushrooms and his hurt back. They grabbed their equipment, and six of them rushed to his side. Then the neighbor lady came down the path. I told her I'd replace the crushed flowers. She was concerned about the boy. I never can focus properly on the crucial issues during a crisis. My mind goes to the crushed flowers, but the broken back, that will be fine.
It won't be fine. His back is broken in two places, and the doctors don't really expect the paralysis from the chest down to ever go away. All in a flash, this sturdy boy is paralyzed. How things could have all been different. He could have not come to Los Angeles. He could have not taken mushrooms. He could have been sailing in Massachusetts. He could have gone to Athens for the Olympics. He could have been anywhere else last night, and he wouldn't have ended up in a wheelchair, for the rest of his life.
This morning Sissy went to visit him. He told her how tormented he'd been since Julie has died. That when he was in Miami, he'd been having all kinds of "fucked-up sex." He'd been trying to damage himself. That now he'd be all better, because now he'll never have to have sex again.
I wish it was true. That somehow being paralyzed from the chest down was the answer to someone's problems.
I fear the moment when he changes his mind. Or when the novelty wears off. Or whatever the fuck it is he thinks is going to be okay, goes away.
He was a sturdy boy. |
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| L'attaque de panique |
[Jul. 1st, 2004|10:10 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  quixotic | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Avalanches - "Frontier Psychiatrist" | ] |
Everything is going to stop making sense any day now, and then I have no idea what I'm going to do. I've been keeping myself busy with two creative endeavors for the last several months since I stopped taking jobs that were essentially the opposite of creativity, and which were controlling my life. But I'm afraid that the busy-ness is trickling down now while I wait for the weather to change so I can shoot my boulevard properly, and before I can go into production on my short gay film.
Okay a minor trickle down should not be cause for panic, but I'm looking further into the future and wondering about the major trickle down. What happens when both of my projects are complete? Am I supposed to plan on being busy on junket tours or having lovers for months on the gay film festival circuit? Even if one could depend on that kind of success, what's going to pay for all of it?
"I wouldn't be surprised if the basis of your anxieties were financial." Yeah, that and I don't want to be a house-bound spinster by the time I'm 46 years old. How many nights of vodka on the rocks can I sustain before killing myself of boredom. I actually get sick of myself before my friends do.
So the obvious answer is that Andrew needs to take some employment. He needs to be gainfully employed. But the question remains, which personality is going to get this job? The creative side won't let him do accounting any more, and the accounting side is insisting that he make LOTS of money or at least have benefits. The creative side is woefully underqualified, and the accounting side is somewhat too overqualified to have to start over AGAIN.
Well Andrew, I say, it may help if you stop referring to yourself in the third person. You are become disassociated with the fact that you are a single human being. Don't get too comfortable with that, lest you end up crumpled in a ball in some mid-coast California airport. Why couldn't I have figured all this shit out years ago, when I had more options, or when it wasn't awkward to be a peppy and eager novice. I'm 44 years old. Peppy and eager just isn't all that cute on a 44 year old, I don't care how youthful he seems. |
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| re: am i cRAzy? |
[Jun. 29th, 2004|06:07 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  indescribable | ] |
| [ | music |
| | i'm Deranged | ] |
for your information, i might actually be cRAzy,
but every time i speak to a therapist they
always tell me there's nothing wrong. well,
actually they don't say anything, because
they're just paid to sit there and not say a
word. but yeah, who wouldn't be all happy and
calm while some guy or lady sits there listening
to everything you have to say without ever
saying something mean in return. so yeah, maybe
i'm crazy, just patently undiagnosed. but
obviously not very dangerous.
as far as that post is concerned, i thought it
was nice. it's true, no? sometimes? okay, so
not so nice, but a little conflict can be more
fun than nice. and no, i'm not a drama queen.
went to johnny's party. it was actually really
fun. to me anyway. it wasn't at all boring.
even at 4:00 am.
i hope your party was fun. at least i know the
music was good.
hope you're well too!
andrew
Roddy wrote:
> are you cRAzy?
> what the HELL is that post of yours?
> did you go to johnny's?
> i dj'd some party.
> hope you're well,
> rb |
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| My next job. |
[Jun. 24th, 2004|12:26 am] |
By DAVID GERMAIN
CULVER CITY, Calif. (AP) - Sam Raimi hopes to remain in film a long time after he's through making "Spider-Man" movies. For about 1,000 years.
Raimi wants to build the "Century Cam," a network of cameras that would document the United States' urban landscape for a millennium.
The proposal: Position cameras above all major American cities and shoot one frame - a 24th of a second of film - each day at noon. The frames would be strung together gradually to create a continuous chronicle of each city's development.
"It's the same idea of all time-lapse photography, but over an outrageous amount of time," Raimi told The Associated Press in an interview to promote "Spider-Man 2.""So you could watch the city of Los Angeles rise, and maybe an earthquake might come in 300 years or a tidal wave."
Along with natural disasters, the cameras would capture human rebuilding and demolition. Viewers could watch decades of change in minutes, much like the hero in George Pal's "The Time Machine," who saw landscapes radically altered as he shot forward in time.
At a frame a day, a year's worth of shots over a particular city would add up to 15 seconds of film, a decade would blow by in two and a half minutes and a century would run 25 minutes. A full 1,000 years of film would last just over four hours. |
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| half-life anomaly |
[Jun. 20th, 2004|06:33 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | awake | ] |
| [ | music |
| | AIR - Walkie Talkie "Biological" | ] |
The end is here.
It's over. My friend and fuckbuddy is now just an ex-fuck, and our friendship is in need of repair. He'd blogged that he'd never marry me. I believed that, but decided to pursue anyway. It felt good. Crushes happen to me so rarely and this one was the real thing. It was full of hope and stupidity. It made me high, it made me dumb, and it finally made me tell him how I feel. One-point-five weeks later it was time to pry myself out of the spoon of his body I'd molded myself into.
When it was over I thought I'd be sad for a long time, but I'm more relieved than anything else. There was a time I'd have been so hooked on a guy that my body would have shut down. I was once so in love with someone that when he starting sleeping with two of my friends we had to break up. The next time I saw him out, I caught a glimpse of him through the corner of my eye and bam-zzthap, a bolt of lightning shot from my shoulder through my heart and out my hip. There was another time I felt wrecked after my boyfriend moved out to live with a 75 year old patron-of-the-arts. For months after or even longer I had to avoid the smell of soap, clean sheets and luxury penthouse hotel rooms because they would make me think of the poor little gone-straight hooker boy I'd wasted a year on. That's me in the corner.... But with this one, I've seen him out and there was no electric shock, just a nagging feeling that I was stupid, and fell in love with someone I shouldn't have fallen in love with.
He was actually pretty easy to get over. Especially after the litany of reasons he gave for why I'm in love with him and why he'll never be in love with me. Surprisingly, none of his reasons actually hit the mark. I was in love with him because he made love to me. He seemed smart, quirky, interesting, sort-of beautiful, and we GOT each other. He was really very generous with himself, his emotions, his ideas, and on many levels he accepted me for who I am. He inspired me to be more creative.
There may be any number of reasons for him not to be in love with me, but I don't read minds. Even if I did, there really is no accounting for taste. Biological. I don't know why I feel this way with you.... I guess it doesn't go both ways.
All I can really question is why this person was enjoying so much time in my bed? He was lying by me, and lying to me at the same time. And lying to himself. He can be that way with many, many people. Talented, I guess, or lucky.
It was easiest to get over him, because I now know we didn't GET each other at all. We had what felt like a physical connection, but that was nothing but a full-body facade. He thought I was a half-person with nothing to do but obsess over him. I do have a bunch of free time, and I did have a crush on him, but there's still more to me than that. I'm far from complete, but I'm more than a half, okay? I won't be complete until I'm dead, and then there may still be even more work to do. |
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| fuck, buddy |
[Jun. 10th, 2004|09:05 pm] |
At the risk of sounding like I'm investing too much in an another individual I need to describe how it's possible for one person to enter another person's life and give him the wherewithal to take new risks in his life, and for that reason I can be forever grateful that a friend and fuckbuddy has come along, moved here from another place, and found me and told me that not only is it okay for me to be the way I am, he insists on it. There have been many times in my life that I've forgotten myself, been away from me. There have been times in my life that I've felt as if I'd never been to me, that I'd totally lost my religion, and fallen into a trap, been covered by an avalanche that seemed I could never free myself from.
Whenever I get on a plane, I always assess my life at that moment and decide whether a fall from the sky would be devastating or welcome. The determination alway depends on how happy, hopeful, and productive I am, including but not exclusive to career, sex life, love life, family, friends, nostalgia, sentimentality, health, and finances, or how miserable I am, desperate, depraved, hopeless, broke, and disillusioned, not excluding but inclusive of ill health, loss of loved ones, abuse by a lover, hopelessness, lack of caring, emptiness, empty nest-ness, betrayal or abandonment by family, detachment, disgust in government, or just general malaise and ennui. Whether the plane crashes or not, the answer sometimes surprises me. If my life is seeming to go well, I may welcome a crash after all, because like dying in bed, sometimes it's best to go out in a blissful state. After all life revolves, not around me, but it does revolve and evolve, like the planet, the stars, the cosmos what have you, so one day might seem cloudy and full of hope, and yet another might be bright and sunny, exposing the horrors, and creepy crawly things, the slime ready to ooze out of the cracks, to get on your feet, up your legs and fester behind your knees. So yes, if I'm in a good mood, let's crash, let's burn, let's leave them wanting more. Why not? Whereas, if I'm in a bad mood? Oh what the hell, let's fucking die already, life sucks right?
Well that all depends on how you live it. Many people have faith. I have no faith, at least not the kind those people have. But I'm an eternal optimist. Even when I'm being pessimistic, I see that there's a bright slivery lining. I'm the one who believes that those who feel that the glass is half full, that they're the pessimists, because if it's half full, it's only half full, whereas if it's half empty, it's only half empty. To me, only half empty sounds better than only half full. Much better. And besides, there's usually a bunch of ice left anyway.
So anyway, I'd just like to go on record. I for the moment don't want the plane to crash. I'm in an in-between state, where I want to see what's going to happen next. I'm driven to make my life more enjoyable, to make my own risks, and for the moment I have someone who's lying by me making sure I do just that. Even if it's just this fleeting moment, he's been a catalyst, and I'm lucky to be a recipient of his spark.
Sorry to sound so sappy. Sorry not to provide some metaphor. This is really drab writing, but it's my fucken journal. Read my other entry. I really likes that one.
Over. |
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| 23' long model |
[May. 24th, 2004|02:41 pm] |
i woke up this morning after not sleeping all night knowing what i had to do. and that was to turn down that job that had been haunting me for the last three weeks. so what if it's a famous german director that i'd always wanted to work with? so what if i'd been waiting two years for this job to finally happen? so what if it meant i could no longer go to montana for the summer and ride horses and maybe even cowboys? all i knew is that something was telling me that i didn't want this job, so i decided to listen for once, and i took the out given me when they started replacing the very people that had asked me to come play in the first place. i've already acknowledged that the only reason i ended up doing accounting in film was because it gave me a chance to work closely with the coen bros. after everyone else had gone home. it was my very first movie job, except for the one that had me lugging sodas and cleaning up microbe-infested abandoned subway stations after all the creative people went drinking-- and it was with my two favorite young filmmaking upstarts. a year later, we'd finished the mix and delivered the film to the distributer. throughout that year, i'd sent and received tens of correspondences to 20th c. fox, in hollywood, and each time i signed each letter, i felt in some small way that my name was being immortalized in a studio vault, like gloria swanson, or james mason.
when i was little my parents for some reason had an auction catalog from that same studio. in it amongst the gowns and shoes of faded actresses, there was one item that caught my eye, a 23' long model of the titanic from the filming of "a night to remember". had i been able to sneak out of the house and make it to the auction, an auctioneer would have had to kick out a little 5 year old boy bidding on the model of the once enigmatic but now over-exposed liner. back then, before she was found and raped and filmed and viewed by millions of movie-goers, the titanic was one of the closest things we had to mythology. nothing was considered more tragic than a young death. in the collective consciousness that once existed on the earth, she was an ocean liner resting silently on the ocean floor as intact as the day she hit the block of ice that plunged her to the irretrievable depths. everyone knew that the water was so cold and dark and compressed that corrosion and decay were completely impossible. the bodies of the drowned millionaires were still entombed in the luxury that they'd been accustomed to; the grand stairway and the stained-glass dome above it, submerged, frozen in time, waiting timelessly. it wasn't until the poseidon was rolled over by a freak tidal wave one new year's eve that we again saw such grandeur destroyed in a flash right before our eyes.
so i've turned down a job i should have turned down years ago. the sterile icy world of numbers and receipts never could have repressed me into a ten-key existence where my only productivity fits onto a roll of paper 2-1/4" wide and hundreds of miles long. the world was shocked and saddened to learn that once found, the titanic was not intact as promised. her steel railings and hull had transformed into rusticles as her majesty slowly dripped away. she was split in two, not at all proud and upright. all of her finely carved wood, had been completely devoured by worms. there were no millionaires to be found, not even their bones, just their luggage. oh so much luggage. |
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| fresh graves |
[May. 23rd, 2004|12:30 pm] |
yesterday was a less than blissful day since as usual i've been dangling in this sort of limbo between the world of genius performers and artists that have no problem speaking their minds and receiving all kind of praise and recognition for everything from sweet brilliant music that seeps into my brain and speaks to my inner-being as if the sounds and my soul had been together since my it was created some billion and a half years ago (them) and this other side of the universe of people that keep their houses immaculately clean and somehow have no qualms about being satisfied having toddlers and strollers and wagons and suvs and everything else those pastel powdered soccer moms drag around with in their visored bouffants occasionally breaking a sweat (would have been me but i'm a fag who happens to hate the smell of powder). i'm all into this dorky thing of looking for old photos of whatever town i'm living in like some sort of barnabas collins going back through time cos angelique is out there somewhere and i may spot her in an old photo of my street. so yesterday i went to a salon (not the type where they burn your hair) at a gallery cos this LA historian professor was speaking about a dvd rom he's published. he was very funny and kept going off on a tangent about bush's paranoia and how americans from this era will be viewed in the future as some sort of freakish thing one could dress up as on halloween. afterwards i spoke to his lovely assistant who asked me my credentials of which i have only a lowly bachelor's degree and then informed me that my PROJECT is similar to a couple of well established artists and she gave me their names and i went home and went online and looked at their work which of course seemed cooler than my PROJECT and that made me want to cry, again.
then mike called to say he wasn't coming to see johnny guitar with my buds at the hollywood forever (cemetery) and that made me even more bummed cos he's been tied up all week with his ex's sister and her bf, by all week, i mean all week but we won't go into that. i almost decided not to go to the movie but terry said i should just come along with him and his date and so i did. getting there was amazing. it was all sunny and hundreds of people were arriving from all angles and being let in through these huge iron gates and walking across vast lawns past the russian tombstones with photos etched into black marble so you could see exactly what the dead people looked like. some of the tombs had the faces of people on them who weren't even dead yet. we spread out our blankets and sat down and ate chicken and drank wine and then lisa and jay and their whole gang showed up and moved right next to us and then the movie began. i'd seen it a couple of times but never before with a hip crowd in a cemetery where people could howl at the screen. lisa kept commenting at the one liners the otherwise stilted dialogue was peppered with, saying "i have to use that line," and of course today no one can remember any of them. after the movie ended we watched as everyone left looking very much like a mass exodus of zombies and then traipsed amongst the tombstones remarking at how many fresh graves there are. we lit a few candles for the ones that had died young and then left ourselves to to (surprise) have a drink. |
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| denmark in winter |
[Apr. 9th, 2004|03:33 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | keep it to yourself | ] |
i should be very happy.
i've just forced myself out of a somewhat lucrative but stressful and loathesome life of work, because there's no creative outlet in accounting, even if it is in the world of filmmaking. when i was eight years old i hated math and i still hate math, so how and why did i ever end up doing math for a living? the "i hate math" barbie was right, i have to start looking on ebay for one.
now all i have to do is stop talking about the occupational suicide i just committed because no one, and i mean no one likes a whining bean-counter, especially me, so unless i stop, i'll never enjoy another absolut citron on the rocks as long as i live.
i'd forgotten somewhere along the way that in los angeles if someone asks you how you are, you're supposed to say "fine." if you have one story about how good things are and another story about how less than good things are, completely omit the second story from your repertoire. it's not that people are too shallow to care about your problems, it's just that they're not in any position to do anything about it so why even bring it up? |
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